The Problem for Bernie Sanders: The Narrow Lane to Hillary Clinton’s Left

The presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont and self-described socialist who will most likely champion the liberal cause, won’t change that fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton is poised to win the Democratic nomination without a serious contest.

That’s true even though the Democratic Party’s liberal activist base, which strongly opposed her bid in 2008, has considerable reservations about her ties to Wall Street, her foreign policy, the recent allegations about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and the revelations about the private email account and server she used when she was the secretary of state.

This is mainly because of Mr. Sanders’s own weaknesses as a candidate and Mrs. Clinton’s strengths. But there is another, strangely simple reason Mrs. Clinton will have an easy road to the nomination: The left wing of the Democratic Party just isn’t big enough to support a challenge to the left of a mainstream liberal Democrat like Mrs. Clinton.

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Bernie Sanders at an event in Washington this month.CreditWin Mcnamee/Getty Images

That might seem somewhat surprising if you’re an affluent, secular, well-educated person living along the coasts, in places like Bethesda, Md., Berkeley, Calif., or Montclair, N.J., where the party really is dominated by the uniformly liberal voters who love Elizabeth Warren and harbor at least some reservations about Mrs. Clinton. From that vantage point — which happens to be the same as that of many political journalists — it often looks as if Mrs. Warren could even defeat Mrs. Clinton.

But the Democratic primary electorate is nothing like these liberal enclaves. Elsewhere, the party includes a large number of less educated, more religious — often older, Southern or nonwhite — voters who are far from uniformly liberal.

The majority of Democrats and Democratic primary voters are self-described moderates or even conservatives, according to an Upshot analysis of Pew survey data from 2014 and exit polls from the 2008 Democratic primary.

Some of these self-described moderates hold fairly liberal views. But the “mostly liberal” Democrats barely outnumber Democrats with “mixed” or conservative policy views, according to the Pew data, which classified respondents based on how consistently they agreed with Democratic policy positions. Only about a quarter of Democratic-leaners hold the consistently liberal views that would potentially put them to the left of Mrs. Clinton.

These moderate and conservative Democrats allowed Bill Clinton to easily win the nomination in 1992 as a moderate Southern Democrat. They helped give Hillary Clinton a wide lead in the polls in 2008, until Barack Obama won Iowa and built an enormous lead among black voters — who represent about 20 percent of Democratic voters. Many black voters are moderate or conservative, allowing Mr. Obama to overcome the disadvantage faced by left-liberal Democratic candidates.

If the front-runner for the Democratic nomination were a fairly moderate Democrat, it would be easier to imagine a liberal Democratic candidate who could consolidate the liberal wing of the party and have a real chance of wining the nomination.

But by any measure — Senate voting record, public statements or campaign contributions — Mrs. Clinton is a liberal. She fares better among liberal Democrats than moderate ones in public opinion polls. She struggled to win over very liberal voters when running against Mr. Obama in 2008. But she did not lose them by a wide margin — and in some places, she won them. It was also at a time when the war in Iraq was more salient, and her weakness on Iraq then was far clearer than her weakness on economic issues now.

A strong challenger on Mrs. Clinton’s left would probably stand a good chance of faring well among very liberal voters again, but would struggle to build a broad enough coalition to have a plausible chance of winning the nomination.